U.nu enters the short URL arena

The field of link-shortening services is getting a bit crowded these days, with new ones popping up seemingly every week. U.nu is one of the latest contenders, and its attractively short and easy to remember base url might help it catch on. A U.nu link is way easier to type out or read to someone over the phone than the unicode characters offered by tinyarro.ws, for example, and it's shorter than bit.ly or tr.im.

Other shorturl sites sweeten the deal with advanced features like link tracking or custom urls, and U.nu has its own set of perks to consider. It doesn't do fancy analytics, but it does tell you how many people have clicked. It doesn't use characters that are easy to mistake for others, like 0, O, 1, I, and l. It's also not case-sensitive, so anyone typing your URL won't have to worry about proper capitalization.

I find it a little odd that U.nu is focusing on make the URLs easy to say and type, when the most common use cases seem to involve just copying and pasting them, although I can see the benefit if you're on an iPhone. On the other hand, no one else seems to be addressing those particular concerns, so maybe U.nu has the market cornered.

Tags: shorturl, tinyurl, u.nu, url-shortener